COVID-19

so it is just to protect themself? In which case they should wait till the appropriate place the the scientists have put them at the risk. Those above them are classed as higher risk

 

The island thing is a misnomer and everyone knows that. The implication that we could just close up the drawbridge and cocoon ourselves is rubbish. There is probably no other island in the world that is so closely connected to 7 or 8 other highly infectious countries in close proximity and a recent history of international integration.

The stop date on this thing is simply when the vaccine produces herd immunity - nothing between now and then will affect the end date. It will drag on to that point either through the nightmare of lockdown or with pressure on the NHS, sadly there is probably no third option.

 

Well I hope he gets a quicker reply than me. I sent her an email on the 6th November and despite 2 reminders from my local MSP she has not responded.
Don't be fooled by her daily appearances on your tv.

 

I disagree. Other, mainland, countries like Greece closed their borders so we, as an island could have done so. Johnson chose not to because he doesn't like taking hard decisions that make him unpopular. He's a good time Charlie + absolutely the worst person to have in charge in a crisis.

Hospitals are full to bursting with Covid patients again. Some hospitals are saying it's worse than during first lockdown. The staff are exhausted and fewer in number because increased testing means they are isolating in greater numbers. Something has to be done to stop complete NHS meltdown, costing even greater numbers of lives. Yes, lockdown is a nightmare, but its totally necessary at the moment.

 

This is what I mean though. Greece? There is no way that Greece is as interconnected as the UK and they they mainly closed their borders to specific countries. I genuinely wouldn't have liked the borders to be closed and you would definitely have seen empty shelves in the supermarkets, would people have put up with that? There was panic when we couldn't get toilet roll let alone fruit and veg!

Well we'll see. i think the number that has really freaked them out is the number of positives going from 40k on the 26th to 80k on the 29th by the looks of it and I do understand it.

I just hope we get these liberties back as easily as we've given them up and the economic damage when these debts have to be repaid isn't too catastrophic.

 

Johnson yesterday:
"There's no doubt about it - schools are safe"

Johnson today:
" Schools must close for at least six weeks".

You couldn't make him up.

 

I'd love to know if I'm allowed to go to work tomorrow. Impossible for me to work from home as I'm a tradesman and if don't work my family have no money?

 

Thankfully I think you can. The advice is up on the gov.uk website and it still says you can "leave home for work purposes where it is unreasonable for you to do your job from home" and then talks about tradesmen again further in the document.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/949536/NationalLockdownGuidance.pdf

 

The longer it goes on the more catastrophic it will be. If we'd bitten the bullet sooner and harder it would have been less economically damaging.

When I said we should have closed the borders, I obviously didn't mean to essential food and medical supplies. It should have been about limiting the number of entries to the absolute minimum necessary instead of having people gadding about flying in and out for months with no proper testing, tracking and tracing and no enforceable quarantine arrangements. Commercial business trips should have been done online only. People arriving here should have been required to stay in quarantine centres like they did in NZ and Oz. All of this would have been doable if the government hadn't gone completely AWOL in February and had actually done some planning, like a proper government.

 

They were required to stay in quarantine. Personal responsibility again.

Closing the borders is closing the borders, I thought we weren't doing half measures? Once again the UK has the busiest airport in Europe and 12 of the top 100, not all of them are tourists, it's massively interconnected. Massively different to NZ, OZ or Greece.

There is no country like the UK who has made this work......if "working" is getting the virus down to a consistently controllable level like Australia or New Zealand. Countries who are much different to the UK have, but nowhere that is similar. Ignoring the differences just means you're chasing an outcome that is impossible in the UK.

 

Across Bradford tens of thousands of children have needlessly mixed with classes of 30+ for no good reason for one day.

Yesterday morning on Breakfast TV Boris declared schools safe, a day later and with data no different than the day before schools are shut for six weeks.

The Tories would be tearing strips off Labour if the roles were reversed for incompetence.

The education minister should be out of a job.

Johnson needs to stop this over promising. It's stupid and its devoid from reality.

 

I never said they were mostly tourists. There are thousands of business trips in and out of UK airports every day - most of them unnecessary in a time of crisis when they could be done online. Of course that's far from ideal, but these are extraordinary times requiring extraordinary measures.
All kinds of extreme, unthinkable things were done and not done during WW2 and people put up with them for the greater good. To me, this is akin to a war situation, requiring drastic emergency measures. We can't just pretend that things can potter along as normal when we are living through the biggest global crisis of all our lifetimes.

Unfortunately we are lumbered with a feckless leader and an inexperienced, third -rate cabinet who were really only designed and fit for one thing - getting Brexit done. They thought they were going to be lauded as national heroes for delivering their glorious promised future - instead they have been saddled with governing through an unprecedented national and international crisis. As MacMillan famously said, "events dear boy; events". It's their misfortune, and ours, to be the wrong government at the wrong time.

 

self employed too, realise i’m in scotland but think it is broadly the same, as Aaron says, we can go to work. Obviously have to distance, wear necessary PPE etc but reading what they said up here, for electrical work the list of what would be ok was still pretty broad. There are still inland revenue grants for the self employed in case you weren’t aware.

 

I know you didn't say they would be tourists, I was comparing them to traditional tourist hotshots like Australia, NZ and Greece that would get lower flow anyway. Its very easy to put the trips down as superfluous but many won't have been as well.

We can go round in circles all the time buy the bottom line is that no country of a simple size and situation to the UK managed to get covid to anywhere near a zero cases level or stop transmission into the country. It makes me think that it isn't a easy to do as you believe.

But hey ho, plenty of time to think about it now haven't we?

 

This Government is serially incompetent. Now Brexit is done, get rid of the political cronies and get serious politicians in. I am not saying Tories out, but get rid of people like Gavin Williamson.

Anyone remember the promises last June that were made about additional support for children’s learning?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53011717

That has not happened. Regardless of the proposed approach, which I had issues with, I am not aware of any plans or any actual activity to help address the gap.

We repeatedly hear about increasing access for home learning, but there has been absolutely nothing for my children. I rang all the parents for children in my class yesterday, to explain that we were moving to on-line learning for most of the children. I was also checking exactly what access the children have. More than a third of the children will need to use their parent’s mobile phone and/or share a device that isn’t a laptop/pc with siblings. Many children still just don’t have access, let alone the issues around data usage limits for parents.

Our school on-line learning platform is basically a document repository. Documents are uploaded and then the end-user (ie. the child) needs to download to their device to access. It is clunky and basically unusable on a mobile phone. I can add links, but there is nothing interactive.

Yes, you can point at the procurement process at my school (I wasn’t involved despite my prior experience of programme management in a previous career). However, in the past nine months, I haven’t seen any activity either at a national or local level to establish what should be a minimum level of access and functionality and an assessment to close the gap. How many people with appropriate skills to develop and improve the national capability have been furloughed?

I get the initial challenges last March. However, all of what is happening now was broadly predictable. The growth in cases over the winter etc. It was always likely that schools would close again. To have no additional contingency, or overview of what that should be, is a failure of Government.

I’ve enjoyed my moan, I’m now going to try and get 31 children to remote learn today. Back in school tomorrow teaching in class and providing remote learning simultaneously.

 

Yeah, the way they’ve handled the corona virus allays any fears I have about their judgement on Brexit......

i honestly can't imagine how you and other teachers are managing, if you were juggling it’s like they just keep throwing more and more at you. I know it is scant consolation, but I hope you and other teachers know that your efforts are appreciated.

 

Incidentally, to show it is not impossible, schools up here were told before Christmas to prepare for measures changing in January, so it makes a mockery of how the government have handled the school situation in England (assume similar in Wales and N Ireland?). Not sure what @Hoochy-Min ’s experience is?

 

You should be allowed though.

This is half the problem.

Trademan, estate agents shouldn't be allowed to do their jobs. Tough!

This really is a yet another not really lockdown